Future responses to environment-related food self-insufficiency, from local to global

Abstract

In the coming decades, communities may become exposed to local food self-insufficiency due to climate change, land degradation and land scarcity. Rapid population growth may exacerbate this. To support mitigating policies, answers are needed to the following two research questions: (i) Where and to what extent will environment-related food self-insufficiency occur or increase over the period from 2015 to 2050 and (ii) How will local communities respond to increased food self-insufficiency? Potential responses to food self-insufficiency are agricultural expansion, agricultural intensification, import, migration, starvation and violent conflict. Answering these research questions is hampered for different reasons. A persistent debate is ongoing on whether environmentally induced food deficit may cause migration and violent conflict at all. Although a clear relationship is assumed as self-evident by many scholars and politicians, as yet no convincing evidence has been found, in contrast to the relevance of socioeconomic factors. Moreover, a lack of consistent and accurate data on local food supply and demand hampers mapping of food self-insufficiency in the present and future. In this article, we explore the difficulties to find a clear relationship between environmentally induced food deficit, migration and violent conflict, and propose and test an operational methodology that does provide preliminary answers to the research questions: the necessary conditions approach. The results are presented in maps and tables of environment-related food self-insufficiency and of plausible responses for 2015 and 2050. Over that period, local food self-insufficiency roughly doubles as well as the number of people living in conditions that favour starvation, migration and violent conflict. The increase in food self-insufficiency is mostly caused by a significant population growth on the one hand—hence the demand side—and a stagnating or even slightly declining food production on the other. In contrast, food self-sufficiency stays high and constant on the global scale.